On November 7th, ICON member Karl Gauffin will participate in a symposium organized by the Centre for Medical Humanities at Uppsala University commemorating the 50th anniversary of the book “The Medical Nemesis” by the Austrian theologian and philosopher Ivan Illich.
The book rose to fame because of its radical criticism of medicine and health care. Illich does not only about the ill-health that results from inappropriate medical care and treatment, but also about the tendency to understand all human suffering in medical terms. In this way, Illich drew attention to the phenomenon of medicalisation, an issue that is still hotly debated today.
The symposium is in Swedish and Karl will give a talk entitled “The risk of risk awareness”. It will address the strong interest in risk and risk assessment in public health sciences and discuss which risks might be worth taking seriously and which we might be better off ignoring.
In public health and epidemiology, terms such as risk, resilience, susceptibility, and vulnerability are part of our everyday language, I think we would be well advised to go back to the conceptual history of these terms, and reflect on the implications of their use today.
Karl Gauffin
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Karl Gauffin
Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences
Centre for Health Equity Studies (CHESS)
Department of Public Health Sciences
Stockholm University
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